


Sky

by orphan_account



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Battlestar Galactica, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Crossover, Friendship, Gen, Supernatural/Battlestar Galactica, spn!bsg, spn/bsg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-09-15
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean wants to know why Cas doesn't miss being planet-side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sky

Dean misses the sky—the proper sky, blue and above him and maybe sometimes filled with clouds, more real, somehow, than the pitted infinity that gapes at him out here. It irritates him that Cas doesn't seem to care, seems content to look out viewports at the yawning dark for the rest of his life.

He tries to explain it as they eat dinner in his quarters, a meeting of friends and a dealing-with-paperwork session all in one. It's protein squares and algae, and it tastes alternately horrible and of nothing at all, but it doesn't matter; the two of them are too engrossed in figures and reports, anyway, poring over them with their plates placed amidst piles of faded paper. "You can't just _not care_ ," he's saying, gesturing with his fork over the stack of Viper repair rundowns. "It's not right not to care. You're supposed to feel like there's something missing, like—like a yearning."

"I don't know what to tell you, Dean." Cas doesn't look up from the report he's reading, his own fork hanging in mid-air above his plate, forgotten. "The blue sky is just a light illusion that obscures this. When you looked up on the Colonies, this was always what you looked at, if not always what you saw." 

"I _know_ that, Cas," Dean says, exasperated. He pauses to pick out the blob of algae meatloaf that seems least revolting, chews, swallows. "Gods, I know, I passed grade school physics. And five-space navigational math, for that matter. That's not the point." 

"What is the point?" The other commander sets down the paper in his hand, looks up at him. His expression is hard to read—it's always hard to read—but Dean thinks there's a twinge of annoyance there, deftly hidden behind the still stare. 

"The point," he tells Cas, "is that it means something. We looked up at that blue trick of the light for most of our lives, and when we dreamed about flying, it wasn't out here, it was there. We looked up at the sky and we saw, I don't know. Freedom, maybe." 

"I never dreamed of flying," Cas says, mildly, and finally remembers to lever a protein cube off his plate and into his mouth. He looks back to the handwritten missive demanding his attention. "I just got in a Viper and did it." 

Dean shakes his head, maybe in disbelief, maybe just in frustration. "You really don't feel it, do you? I don't get you, sometimes. I know you care—I've never seen anyone care more about his crew, or this fleet, than you. But you've got no, no, no," he searches for the right word, spinning his hand in the air to indicate that it's on the tip of his tongue, "no _soul_." 

"At the academy, the senior pilots liked to say that you lost a little bit of yourself to the flight, every time you jumped." Dean is surprised that Cas remembers this, much less brings it up. "Maybe I flew for too long."

"That's why they called you Angel, wasn't it?" Dean rests back in his chair, slings an arm over the back, the urge to just let these reports rot strong. (He can't, of course; if the cylons jump them tomorrow things need to be signed and ready and done, and if that means staying up late to find out what's missing and what's needed, he will.) "Not because of your temperament, or anything, but because you liked to fly the long trips, with the half a dozen jumps, out to the unexplored regions. 'Searching for Heaven,' they joked." 

"Yes," Cas says. "That's what they said." 

"What were you really looking for, out there?" Dean reaches for the glass of scotch sitting amidst the paper piles, drinks. The bottle he has of it is probably the last of its kind in the universe, unless one of the civilian ships happens to be concealing gross quantities of liquor. 

"I was looking for something the art galleries and opera houses of Caprica couldn't give me," the angel answers. (Dean's picked up on the way the Leviathan pilots refer to their commander, and now it won't get out of his head. The angel; not Angel, as might be appropriate by his callsign, but _the_ angel, the only one in the fleet. He wonders if it started with the in-joke: _our commander's an angel—how's yours?_ ) 

"And did you find it?" Dean leans forward again, settles on his elbows, scotch still in his hand. "Whatever it was." 

"What I found," Cas says, bluntly, "were barren rocks that could be mined for tillium." He reaches for his own glass of scotch, downs it with alarming speed. "It was the jumps that mattered, and the long flights with the stars overhead."

"Why?" Dean is baffled. Jumping, to him, has always been the most wretched part of being a pilot—a lurch through faster-than-light and out the other side, reducing nuggets to dry heaving and making even experienced pilots cringe. 

"Because it was strange. Because it was brilliant. Because no one—no one, not even the commercial pilots or the other squadrons—got to do what we did, or could do what we did. Become stretched into something ethereal, faster than light, dissembled and put together again farther away from home than the human mind can comprehend, shooting through nebulas or past binary stars that no human eyes had ever seen before." Dean watches Cas carefully as the other commander speaks; it's the most he can remember Cas saying at one time since before the cylons first attacked. There's something about the way the small, saggy-shouldered commander in his unbuttoned officer's blues talks about space, and he almost laughs when he realizes what it is.

"That's it," Dean says, when Cas finishes. "That's _it_." 

"What's what?" Cas asks, frowning faintly at him.

"That feeling you get when you talk about the exploratory jumps. _That's_ what you're supposed to feel when you look at the sky on a planet, a proper planet with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and a gravity of around nine-point-eight meters per second squared." 

"Oh," Cas says, and then he doesn't say anything more, and chews in silence, his gaze drifting back to his papers. And Dean just grins, and wonders at his odd companion, the commander of the only other Battlestar left in the universe; and he thinks, as he looks down into his drink, that maybe it doesn't matter where that soul-scouring longing is _for_ , so long as it _is_.

It's that feeling that makes them all human, after all.


End file.
